Handmade Christmas Reef Cards and Gift Tags - 2012

Christmas Cards 2012 — Handmade Christmas Cards and Gift Tags

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas day with your family or friends while enjoying yummy food and awesome gifts!

As I’m finishing up the Card Project this year, my Christmas cards and gift tags would be the last items for me to create.

I tossed around numerous ideas until I came up with creating Christmas cards as illustrated wreaths. I originally intended to go all out with sparkly glitter and gold pens but after doing a couple of test cards, I decided it would be better to keep then more simple.

Christmas Card 2012 - Test Cards — My test cards. Went overboard and tried a bit of everything on both of them ^^;

While perusing Tumblr one day I stumbled upon the lovely illustrations of Matthew Ellero and was inspired to make my cards with a similar layered effect.

Christmas Cards 2012 - Inspiration piece — Inspiration from the art of Matthew Ellero

Below are some of my WIP shots. I actually created two different batches of cards – those that were mailed out and those that were given out at a party at later date. These are the latter which have a slightly different design to the original set. Each card took about 45 minutes, on and off, to make (waiting for stuff to dry/watching youtube clips).

Christmas Cards 2012 - mockup and tracing — Using a printed mockup, I traced the outlines of the wreath (without the decorations), making sure the left hand edge aligned with the fold.

Christmas Cards 2012 - traced wreath outline — Said traced outline

After tracing, I would cut out the centre of the card, keeping a white outline area around the edges. I would then get another folded piece of paper and glue it inside the original one. This would be placed under a heavy object to ensure it stuck properly.

Cutout and sticking paper inside. — Christmas Cards 2012 – cutout and paste in underlying paper

While that was drying, I traced and coloured in (with watercolour pencils) the decorations on the remaining paper before cutting them out. Each card had unique decorations with varied colour palettes and a bauble including the person’s first initial inside it.

Christmas Cards 2012 - Decorations — The various decorations for the card.

Once the main card had dried, I coloured in the wreath and traced the Christmas message into the middle before inking them both. I then cut out the outside, making sure to include the back of the card so it would be the same shape.

Christmas Cards 2012 - cutting out, watercolour and inking — Card cut out and coloured, Christmas message added and inked

And of course last but not least, all the decorations needed to be glued on and voila – Christmas card complete!

Christmas Cards 2012 - Final card — The finished card

Christmas Cards 2012 - Set of 3 handmade christmas cards — My set of 3

Christmas Gift Tags

I also took time to create some Christmas gift tags based off my card design. They followed a similar creation process to the cards, with the wreath being made of wrapping paper.